High-Quality Iray Christmas Tree?
mmitchell_houston
Posts: 2,524
in The Commons
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I will finally have a little time to work on some new material. One of the pieces will require a high-qality Christmas tree that looks good in Iray. Now, over the years I've picked up a few trees from Daz already, but I haven't used them in Iray. Before I start going through my library, I was wondering if anyone here could suggest a Christmas tree that looks good in Iray?
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I am probably not helping, but when I have converted trees to Iray they have always looked great to me. It shouldn't be that hard to use any Christmas (spruce) tree with Iray without much fuss.
Do a search for a product called "Christmas and Fairy star lights for Daz Iray (emissive light props)" on Google, you might like to use those to light up your tree.
Also, see these: http://www.daz3d.com/dg-iray-deco-metal-shaders
Speaking of the Deco Metal Shaders, the tree I used in that one promo render is this one: http://www.daz3d.com/yuletide-treasure-tree-2011
I pretty much had to change every surface to the Uber Iray shader, and make adjustments from there. The good thing about that set is the light bulbs are their own surface, so it was really easy to turn them into actual light emitters, with just a touch to bloom to sell the effect. I don't think the tree looks like a "real" Christmas tree, but I thought it was fairly convincing for a high quality artificial tree.
I have not come across any Iray ready Christmas trees, or I would have bought it myself. I expect we may see some hit the market fairly soon at this point, but I did that promo over a month ago. I think your best bet is going to be to mess with the surfaces on whatever tree props you already have that you like.
The one I use is from "Redhouse Christmas Carol Exp 1". I converted the shaders to Iray, added metallic gold to the tinsel and added the lights (a cone made of of a few hundreds of little light spheres). I also made the top star lighting using a mask. I am pretty happy with it.
Thanks for the tips, folks. I will be working on the Christmas image this upcoming weekend, so I'll first try what I've got. Then, if that doesn't work, I'll pick up something new and give it a shot.
BTW:, Ralf1958, I am very impressed with your image. Nice job with the tree and with Santa.
And I've never seen your "Long Long Trailer" art. WOW! That is impressive.
Thank you mmitchell_houston!
Just came across this free set of christmas tree ornaments when browsing. Bad thing is that everything is one prop (festoons are a separate prop though), so making it fit perfectly to any tree is probably impossible.
https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/noel-decors-guirlandes/75863
There are links to a couple of free trees on the page, tried the WC-fir one using the MEC4D Iray shaders. Copper Patina shader seems to work well for the tree, used metal and paint shaders for ornaments. Default shaders for festoons as I couldn't make it work well with the metal shaders (maybe you can with some adjustments).
Taozen: Thanks, but that's one odd-looking tree. Does it have a missing transmap? It kinda looks unfinished.
Yea, you're right, I thought it looked a bit odd too, but people do make som not so good looking things sometimes, especially when they're free lol, so I didn't really think about it. It appears though that the .mtl file contains absolute instead of relative references to the mats so it didn't pick them up. I've fixed that and now it actually looks really good, IMO.
Here's a quick one, 20 minutes / 45% done but I think you "get the picture". The tree and branches use the default shaders btw, not sure what to use here for IRay, but I think they look pretty OK anyway.
I've seen that type of tree before. It is an artificial flame retardant tree that is, also, shedding free. It it will not loose leaves as will real trees or even some of the other type of artificial trees.
I looked thru Google images but could not find the name of the tree or the company that makes them; if they even do anymore.
Thanks for the update. That looks MUCH better. If the stuff I've already got doesn't work out, I'll take a look at that one.
The sad thing is, I doubt I'll have any time at all until sometime on Thursday and maybe a few hours on Sunday. The holidays are ramping up and I'm about to be super busy again.
I know this thread is older, but is there an Iray tree anywhere? I've been tweaking what I can find and trying to get the lighting to look right. That's how I found this thread. Would love it if someone made a new tree for Iray with emissive lighting and different color options for the actual tree. Would be nice to render a white christmas tree.
I'm using the Yuletide Treasure Tree 2011 right now. I used photoshop to add white "snow" to one of the textures. It's turning out pretty good with just the iray uber base applied. I had to set subD for the displacement on the needles, as well. Here's a wip I did a few days back, when I was still placing ornaments. It's not the most recent, but it is the largest image with the most detail.
ETA: For the lights, create a small image the colors you want to use. (There are 6 colors of bulbs. I just used all blue because that's what hubby likes.) Use the color image for the Emissive map, set the Emissive color to the RGB equivalent of the map, and set the Emissive Temperature to 0. (I used 35W for the luminance on the image above.)
Looks delicious...I make make one out of green twizzlers & gummibears.
I was looking for a Christmas tree too a few days back and found one in Renderosity freebies made by TruForm - it's not Iray by default, but has enough material zones to customize, I applied some Mec4D metal shaders to the spheres with original bump, some translucency to the needles, emitting shader to the lights, simple glass to the star - one of the 4 needle materials is simple (reflecting) gold - and now it's a nice tree - what can I say, I like it colorful and sparkling! :)
Edit: It can be white too of course! :)
Wow, thanks Jepe!
It looks pretty nice. Only thing missing is a tree skirt - I haven't had any luck finding a freebie and Yuletide Treasure Tree 2011 isn't on sale now. Anyone have luck finding one?
In my latest image I put some presents under the tree that the lower part isn't visible - neat presents are also from TruForm and free at Rendo! :)
Here's an old freebie tree skirt...it's pretty basic, but can be retextured (it's a simple UV)...image/tiling cloth.
http://mystic-nights.com/freebies/details.php?image_id=276&mode=search